Thursday, February 16, 2006

Phone Day

  • I've been getting an increasing number of trash phone calls, after having almost zero for the first two years of living here. About half are recordings from Loudoun politicians wanting tell me why they rock so much. Recently, someone has been calling from inside a Circle K while I'm at work and they don't leave a message. I guess strange things are afoot at the Circle K.

  • I still do not own a cell phone. When I borrow peoples' cell phones to make calls, I usually have to get them to tell me which buttons to push.

  • My phone number is easy to remember because the first five digits are the same. Some people remember other phone numbers by spelling words with the letters below each number. I remember numbers by the pattern my hand makes on the buttons, although I may not remember the actual digits without thinking about it for a few seconds.

  • I never sit still while I'm on the phone -- I'm constantly walking around the house. If I'm in a room with a pattern on the floor, like the kitchen tiles, I will follow the pattern around and around while I talk. I have never answered the phone while doing bathroom-y things (although I heard some guy at work on a cellphone at the urinal once) although I did have a phone conversation while taking a bath once.

  • When I was in high school, I changed the family answering machine message to start with "Hello?" followed by a long pause and the regular message. At least one person a week became so confused that they just couldn't process the bait-n-switch in their minds, leaving messages like "Hello? Hello? Where did you go?" on the machine.

  • I like to talk on the phone, but I rarely ever think to call people unless I have a specific singular question to ask. Yet when people call me, conversations usually last for quite some time. Being a taciturn individual means that I'm not very good at filling in dead air, so my best conversations tend to be with people who like to talk all day long and will fill in the silences without even noticing.

  • In my freshman year of college, I regularly paid almost a dollar a minute to talk to online friends from Canada. I guess we could have just talked over that Internet thingy. Does anyone remember Pow-Wow, that chat program that opened with the loon sound?

  • In high school if I ever called a girl I liked, I would make a mental flow chart of the things she might say and what I would say in response so it sounded like I was a smooth talker. This never really worked because girls don't obey flow charts. Stupid girls.

  • During long summer vacations when I would be upstairs on the computer and my sister would be downstairs watching TV, I would page her over the phone rather than yell down the stairs. There was a number you could dial that would make the phone ring back on itself, so the phone could be a lazy man's intercom. My sister always got pissy about this.

  • People used to make prank calls to 911 from the boathouse at Crew. Once a policeman arrived to trace the call but couldn't find any coaches because they were all out on the water so no one got in trouble.

  • Frogman 'invaded bedroom of lover's boyfriend'
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